Tonight, Notre Dame professor and writer Michael Zukert is scheduled to deliver a lecture titled “Completing the Constitution: The 14th Amendment,” as part of Constitution Day (which was actually last week but who’s keeping track).

Ratified in response to the Civil War, the 14th Amendment greatly expanded the definition of citizenship, due process, and equal protection, to include all people born in the United States. Various scholars interpret the 14th Amendment as either “completing” the original vision the Founding Fathers of the Constitution or radically altering it.

According to Skidmore propaganda:

Zuckert is a specialist in the fields of political theory and Constitutional studies. He has published extensively on a variety of topics, including George Orwell, Plato, Shakespeare, and contemporary liberal theory. He is currently finishing a book called Completing the Constitution: The Post-Civil War Amendments and is co-writing another book on Machiavelli and Shakespeare. In addition, he has been commissioned to write the volume on John Rawls for a series on 20th-century political pvhilosophy. He co-authored and co-produced public radio series Mr. Adams and Mr. Jefferson: A Nine-Part Drama for the Radio. He also was senior scholar for Liberty! (1997), a six hour public television series on the American Revolution, and served as senior advisor on the PBS series on Benjamin Franklin (2002) and Alexander Hamilton (2007). He is currently head of the new Tocqueville Center for the Study of Religion in American Public Life at Notre Dame.

This event is sponsored by the Department of Government as part of the Tang’s ongoing We the Peopleexhibit, a multidisciplinary project which examines how citizens view and interact with the Constitution.